Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock A Man of Universal Mind Book

David Foster Wallace was a great writer of fiction. He was not a great writer of popular math exposition, as this book shows.

The main reason I read this book, besides just curiosity about one of the lesser-read Wallace books, was my interest in figuring out a certain infamous scene in Wallace's wonderful novel Infinite Jest. In that scene, one character (Michael Pemulis) dictates to another a description of a mathematical method, based on the Mean Value Theorem, that he says will simplify the calculations involved in playing a certain complicated wargame. But Pemulis' proposed method does not actually make any mathematical sense. (He states the Mean Value Theorem correctly, but there is no useful way to apply it to the problem he wants to solve.) Ever since reading that scene, I've wondered if this was a mistake on Wallace's part or a deliberate choice intended to cast doubt on Pemulis' mathematical ability. Since Everything and More deals with some of the same sort of math that appeared in that scene (elementary calculus), it seemed like a good place to look for answers about Wallace's own grasp of that material.

Unfortunately, it was. This book is full of errors. A lot of them are just terminological solecisms that general readers won't notice or care about, but there are also some mathematical arguments in the book that are seriously flawed -- some of them much worse, in fact, than Pemulis' argument. (Some of them are wrong in an utterly weird, "only a stoned undergrad at 3 AM could think like this" way, which makes me wonder how on earth they got found their way into the book -- extreme time pressure, maybe?) I'm now forced to conclude that the Mean Value Theorem thing in IJ is not a sly bit of characterization, but simple authorial incompetence.

Everything and More is also very poorly written and organized. There's very little of the usual Wallace charm and cleverness, and a lot of aimless rambling, needless distinctions and clarifications-that-don't-really-clarify. Anyone who reads this book without no knowledge of the relevant math will come out of the experience with the impression that it is incredibly thorny and complicated and that Wallace has done his heroic best to shape it into some popularly presentable form. As it happens, most of the math is actually quite simple, and most of the appearance of complexity here is an artifact of Wallace's style -- the result of inconsequential (or incorrect!) nitpicking and a dizzying, needlessly scattered order of presentation.

It makes me sad to think that there are people out there whose first impression of Wallace will come from this book.